Book Information: Peckham's Marbles

from the publisher
'Would you say you had all your marbles?' 'That's for me to know and for you to find out.'
Such is the snappy retort of Eral Peckham to a nosy doctor, but he knows the reader will know that Peckham is exhibiting a sangfroid he does not feel. After all, his relentlessly highbrow novel, The Sorry Scheme of Things, has sold only three copies; he has failed to score with either the lissome Binnie Aspenwall or her statuesque aunt, Mrs. Delbelly, who owns and runs Dappled Shade, the rest home where he is recovering from hepatitis.
Gnawed by frustration, driven by curiosity, Peckham sets out for America's heartland to find the three readers of his novel. It is an additional burr under the saddle that his laggard publisher, Dogwinkle, is also the purveyor of Break Slowly, Dawn, a bestselling first novel (trash, Peckham dubs it) by one Poppy McCloud. Then he meets Poppy autographing books in Omaha and the die is cast - for an affair of such sublime incongruity and such misguided patronizing, as Peckham plays Svengali to Poppy's Trilby, that neither love nor literature will ever be the same.